St. Blogory’s— The internet café d’un prêtre à la retraite ac o offeiriad wedi ymddeol.

October 20, 2021 Volume 3, Issue 4

The Sabbatical Sentinel

and

Tired-Again Times

Did anyone notice that the last newsletter was titled

Old People's Geezette?!

 

TIMELY ADVICE

Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you. ~ Carl Sandburg.

 

2022 RETIREE ANNUAL ENROLLMENT: NOW THROUGH NOVEMBER 12, 2021

Please notice that the end of this enrollment period is a month earlier than last year— this in order to have plenty of time to make a smooth transition to the improved plan and to issue our new ID cards.

With all the communications we have received from UnitedHealthcare and the Church Pension Group over the last several months, this is our attempt to give you the bite-sized highlights:

1. The 3 Medicare Supplement Plans we had in 2021— Comprehensive, Plus, and Premium— are succeeded by 2 Group Medicare Advantage [GMA] Plans— Comprehensive and Premium.

2. The GMA Comprehensive plan has a monthly premium of $196 per person, and the most you will ever have to spend in 2022 for medical expenses will be $2,000.

The GMA Premium plan has a monthly premium of $286 per person, and the most you will ever have to spend in 2022 for medical expenses will be $1,500.

Please Note: Spouses may enroll in different plans according to their individual medical situations.

3. If you were enrolled last year, and don't re-enroll by November 12, you will be automatically enrolled in the default Premium plan.

4. Medicare Part D prescription coverage is included in both the Comprehensive and Premium plans.

Your prescription co-pay costs will depend on your plan and drug type.

For most retirees, your prescriptions will be transferred to the new plans.

Good Idea: get a supply of your prescriptions to carry you over from 2021 to 2022.

OptumRx Home Delivery replaces Express Scripts for your maintenance medications.

        Your doctor may need provide OptumRx with new prescriptions for mail order.  

        Questions? Call OptumRx at 1-888-279-1828

5. UnitedHealthcare Hearing replaces Amplifon.

    1 routine hearing exam per year is free under both plans

    Comprehensive plan: $3,000 allowance every 3 years (combined for both ears).

    Premium plan: $4,000 allowance every 3 years (combined for both ears).

6. UnitedHealthcare Renew Active® replaces SilverSneakers.

If your current fitness center doesn't already participate in Renew Active®, United Healthcare will work to enroll your fitness center.

7. UnitedHealthcare Global: No co-pay for 24-hour travel and medical assistance services

(Buy travel insurance for additional financial protections.)

8. New: UnitedHealthcare Home Health Care benefits, including Post-Hospital Discharge Meals and Routine Transportation, Non-Medical Care, and Telephonic Nurse Services

9. These additional Church Pension Group benefits continue:

Cigna Dental Plan (please see below for prices)

Health Advocate—help finding doctors, insurance claims, elder care, medications, records

Employee Assistance Program (EAP)— for mental health support

EyeMed Vision— for annual exams, lenses, frames, contact lenses

10. Your new Member ID cards will combine your Medicare and UnitedHealthcare cards, so you will only need your UnitedHealthcare ID card when your provider asks for your insurance information.

 

Clergy Pension Plan Retiree Medical Subsidy

The Church Pension Fund will continue to subsidize our medical coverage as follows:

1. For Clergy eligible to retire before July 1, 2013, and with 20 Years of Credited Service:

The subsidy equals the full cost of the GMA Premium Plan

 

2. For Clergy eligible to retire before July 1, 2013, and with 10 to 19 Years of Credited Service:

The subsidy is reduced $2 per Year of Credited Service under 20 years

 

3. For Clergy eligible to retire before July 1, 2013, and with 5 to 9 Years of Credited Service:

No subsidy

 

4. For Clergy NOT eligible to retire before July 1, 2013, and with 20 Years of Credited Service:

The subsidy equals the full cost of the GMA Premium Plan

 

5. For Clergy NOT eligible to retire before July 1, 2013, and with 10 to 19 Years of Credited Service:

The subsidy is reduced 5% per Year of Credited Service under 20 years

 

6. For Clergy NOT eligible to retire before July 1, 2013, and with 5 to 9 Years of Credited Service:

No subsidy

A New Wrinkle!

Please note that these subsidies are based on the Premium plan. If you choose the less expensive Comprehensive plan, your unused subsidy dollars may be used to offset the cost of dental insurance.

In the best-case scenario, if you have 20 Years of Credited Service and choose the Comprehensive Plan, the Dental & Orthodontia Plan is yours at no cost.

 

Clergy Pension Plan Retiree Dental Plans and Rates

1. Dental & Orthodontia Plan: $90 per person per month

2. Basic Plan: $74 per person per month

3. Preventive Plan: $61 per person per month

 

Questions? Contact Information

1. UnitedHealthcare (866) 519-5401; TTY 711; Monday to Friday 8:00 AM to 8:00 PM local time. (expanded to 7 days a week during transition). For UnitedHealthcare's website, please click here.

2. The Episcopal Church Medical Trust (800) 480-9967 Monday to Friday 8:30 AM to 8:00 PM ET.

For Church Pension Fund's website, please click here.

3. Register to attend an online Benefits Education Session by clicking here.

 

This Holiday Season, We Can All Learn a Lesson from Beethoven

By Arthur C. Brooks, in The Washington Post

As his hearing deteriorated, he was less influenced by the prevailing compositional fashions, and more by the musical structures forming inside his own head. His early work is pleasantly reminiscent of his early instructor, the hugely popular Josef Haydn. Beethoven's later work became so original that he was, and is, regarded as the father of music's romantic period.

To read the entire article, please click here.

 

The Pandemic, and Everything Else: 'Our first responsibility is caring for ourselves'

By Neil Steinberg

To read the article, please click here.

 

'If you talk, you live well': the remote Sardinian village with eight centenarians

By Angela Giuffrida

To read the article, please click here.

 

The Young Fall for Scams More Than Seniors Do. Time for a Warning.

By Ron Lieber

To read the article, please click here.

 

Looking to Tackle Prescription Overload

By Paula Span To read the article, please click here.

 

It's time to rethink what loneliness is

By Miriam Kirmayer

To read the article, please click here.

 

Lifting Weights? Your Fat Cells Would Like to Have a Word.

Original Print Title: Our Cells Are Chatty After Exercise

By Gretchen Reynolds

To read the article, please click here.

 

A Birthday Milestone: Turning 80!

By Jane E. Brody

To read the article, please click here.

 

All of our Newsletters with live links are on the internet. Just click here; or search for St. Blogory's, click on the link, and under Categories click on The Sabbatical Sentinel and Tired-Again Times.

Then who can be saved?

 

+ In the Love of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Please take up your lectionary sheet and let's begin with the Gospel reading [Mark 10:17-31]:

"As Jesus was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, 'Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?' Jesus said to him, 'Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.'"

This passage begins so promisingly! This man runs up to Jesus— showing his earnestness and eagerness, and kneels before him— showing his humility and respect, and asks what seems to me to be a really important and excellent question: "Good teacher. . ."— but he's barely out of the gate when Jesus calls a halt!

"Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone."

Which reminds me of something Father Carlton is always reminding us:

"God is good, all the time."

And that's a sentiment that the Old Testament confirms. For example, from Exodus:

"Moses said, 'Show me your glory, I pray.' And God said, 'I will make all my goodness pass before you. . ." (33:18-19)

And from the Psalms:

"You are good and do good. . ." (119:69a), and

"O give thanks to the Lord, for God is good, for God's steadfast love endures for ever" (136:1).

And that's why Jesus says to the rich man, "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone," because even Jesus, "incarnate from the Virgin Mary," is a human being, and only God is good.

And as "good" as you and I may be, we too are only human.

Because, as that famous theologian Bing Crosby says to Rosemary Clooney's character in White Christmas, ". . . everybody's got a little larceny operating in them."

Of course, the next time someone tells you that you're a good cook, or a good listener, or a good anything, or a good person, I do not suggest you say "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone!"

But you might just remind yourself silently that "only God is good!"

Let's continue with our reading, as Jesus directs the man's attention away from himself to God's commandments:

"You know the commandments: 'You shall not murder; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false witness; You shall not defraud; You shall not covet; Honor your father and mother.'"

Did you spot the commandment that isn't one of the Ten Commandments?

Why do you suppose Jesus slipped in You shall not defraud? Did his memory fail him?

Not likely, because he recites the Ten Commandments in perfect order, beginning with the 6th—do no murder— through the ninth— do not bear false witness— before he says "you shall not defraud."

I think I know why he added "You shall not defraud," so stay tuned, while we return to our Gospel reading:

"He said to him, 'Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.' Jesus, looking at him, loved him. . . ."

The Greek word translated looking means looking intently— in other words, Jesus looked deeply into this man, into all this man's earnestness and eagerness, into all his humility and respect— and into all his human fallibility— and loved him.

And the Greek word translated love is agape— the Greek word that the first Christians adopted to mean unconditional love.

Do you know that it's the same for us? Jesus looks intently at each one of us, too, in all our human fallibility, and loves us, loves us unconditionally.

And then Jesus says to him, "'You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.' When he heard this, he was shocked and went away grieving, for he had many possessions. Then Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, 'How hard it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!' And the disciples were perplexed at these words."

Why were the disciples perplexed? Because, like most of their contemporaries, they believed that wealth was a sign of God's favor and blessing. That's the whole idea behind the book of Job, and we can also see it in the Psalms, for example Psalm 128:1:

"Happy is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways. You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be happy, and it shall go well with you."

But there is another tradition in the Old Testament, as we read this morning from Amos, where the prophet condemns those who "trample on the poor" and "push aside the needy in the gate," and bids us to "Hate evil and love good, and establish justice."

And it's this tradition which explains why Jesus inserts "You shall not defraud" into the Ten Commandments.

In addition to the Prophets, this tradition includes the Law— "You shall not withhold the wages of poor and needy laborers" (Deuteronomy 24:14), and the Writings— "My child, do not cheat the poor of their living, and do not keep needy eyes waiting" (Wisdom 4:1).

And so Jesus drives home his point: "'Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.' They were greatly astounded and said to one another, 'Then who can be saved?'"

And then St. Mark tells us that Jesus looked intently at his disciples, just as he had looked intently at the rich man, and said "For mortals— and a more accurate translation is simply "human beings"— "for human beings it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible."

"For God [who alone is good] all things are possible."

The next time Jesus says "all things are possible" for God is in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus prays, "Abba, Father, all things are possible for you."

Even as Jesus confronts "the hard wood of the Cross" in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus knows that with God, all things are possible.

Who, then, can be saved? For us human beings it is impossible, because no matter how good we are, there's still a little larceny in all of us!

But for God all things are possible, and by God's grace, God who is always good, has saved us by the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In 1783, Charles Simeon, an English evangelical priest, wandering through a churchyard while waiting to conduct a funeral, came across a gravestone with this epitaph:

 

When from the dust of death I rise,

To claim my mansion in the skies,

E'en then shall this be all my plea—

Jesus hath liv'd and died for me.

 

Thanks be to God.

 

Epitaph cited in Hugh Evan Hopkins, Charles Simeon of Cambridge (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1977), p. 54.

In 1963, a racist bomb attack on an Alabama church that killed four black girls prompted a Welsh artist, John Petts, in Llansteffan, Carmarthenshire, to make a profound gesture. He designed this window, with the Jesus' words from Matthew 25:40: "You did it to me." The window from the people of Wales was installed in 1965.